


What You Have And What You Hate

by biextroverts



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-19
Updated: 2018-07-19
Packaged: 2019-06-12 21:13:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15348855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biextroverts/pseuds/biextroverts
Summary: Beau dons Molly's coat.





	What You Have And What You Hate

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Taliesin's saying that Beau was the member of the Mighty Nein who had "best earned" Molly's coat during Talks Machina: After Dark on Tuesday.
> 
> Title and epigraph are from "C'mon" by Panic! At the Disco.
> 
> Many thanks to my friend Rowan (@palbuddypoe) who actually listens to anything other than showtunes for providing me with the lyrics that became the title and epigraph. I was going to pull from "Move Toward the Darkness" from The Addams Family Musical, which was my writing music for this fic.
> 
> Anyways, written half-asleep and never edited which are bad habits but bear with me here.

_Try not to mistake what you have with what you hate  
It may leave come the morning._

          They are in no rush to meet up with the Iron Shepherds again after Molly falls. There are the lingering physical aches and pains from the previous day’s battle, of course, the snow piling up in the fields and on the road, that would make it difficult to travel at full speed, but more compelling is the fact that none of them want to. Beau can see it in the way they move through their morning – Nott pours generously from her flask into the pot of stew Caleb is “watching” while he ostensibly reads one of his books, though he never seems to turn the page, Keg drags her bedroll from her tent and drapes it over Molly’s body to keep the snow from soaking through him before promptly falling back asleep in a snowdrift, and Beau moves silently through her forms until the movements feel ingrained in her muscles, the way Dairon says she should but she never actually bothers to. The sun is impossible to make out, but Caleb claims it’s nearly at its apex in the sky by the time they pack up and leave, placing Molly’s still-limp body over Crapper’s back and falling into formation, Beau and Keg on either side of Crapper, Beau leading the horse, and Nott and Caleb behind her, Nott leading Toilet and Caleb leading John. If Beau were the religious type, or the poetic kind, she’d say the gods were mourning with them; the cloudy gray sky and cold, wet air speak of grief as surely as the wails of mourners in a funeral procession.  
  
          Snow continues to fall as they travel, blanketing the landscape with white. Beau wishes she could blanket the backs of her eyelids so she wouldn’t have to see Molly spitting blood each time she blinks. The air is cold, of course, but Beau can barely feel a thing, and what she can feel is heat; the heat of the coal-burning fire that flickers in her stomach, that Dairon is teaching her to channel but that right now just feels like boiling over, and the heat of the tears tracking across her cheeks that she hopes the others are too wrapped up in their own grief to notice.

_           Molly, you bastard _ , she thinks, because being angry is easier than mourning. It doesn’t work; her shoulders tremble just thinking his name, just picturing him dead in the snow, just remembering he’s dead on the horse beside her, and three more tears slip from her eyes. She swipes at them with the back of her hand.

          “Beauregard,” Caleb says finally, after Beau doesn’t know how long travelling. “You’re shivering.”

          “I’m not,” she says. She presses one hand to her opposite forearm, though, and finds gooseflesh there beneath the thin layer of coarser-than-she’d-like brown hair. “So what?” she amends. Now that she’s been pulled out of her gut, she can feel the chill, can feel her body trembling slightly, although whether that’s really the weather or just the sour mixture of fear and anger and sadness and exhaustion that has been running through her veins since yesterday is anyone’s guess. “We have bigger problems than the cold.”

          “We will have bigger problems if you get frostbite,” Caleb says.

          A gust of wind passes overhead, and Beau shudders. Caleb raises an eyebrow at her. Nott offers up her flask – she’s been drinking even more heavily than usual today, lips sealed around the mouth of the flask as they walk like it’s an infant’s pacifier. Beau takes it and tosses back a long swig of bourbon. It burns going down, warming her insides, but the effect only lasts as instant; almost as soon as she’s processed the pleasant heat, it’s disappeared, leaving her just as cold as and even more aware of her coldness than before. She bites her lip to prevent her teeth from chattering, but the blood that draws, its iron taste and its wetness on her tongue when she licks it away, just makes her think of Molly spitting blood even with her eyes open. She shakes her head in an effort to dismiss the vision and resigns herself to the unpleasant clacking together of her teeth.

          Behind her, Caleb coughs. When she looks back at him, he won’t meet her eyes. He stares instead at Molly’s body where it’s splayed over Crapper’s brown back, the baubles on Molly’s horns jingling with each plodding step the horse takes. With a shock that sends her stomach sinking like a stone, she realizes what he’d have her do.  _ Damn him _ . Just because he’s male, older than her, and emotionally closed off, does he think that makes him her father, with a right to ask her to do things “for her own good” no matter how much the idea of doing them makes her want to puke?

          “No,” she says. “Fuck no, Caleb.”

          “Beauregard …” His voice is more like her mother’s than her father’s, the kind of tired irritation that masquerades as kindness and concern.  
  
          “You take it, if you’re so determined we loot our friend’s corpse. He liked you. Or save it for Yasha. Hell, even Fjord – they roomed together.”

          She feels a little bit guilty as Caleb’s face strains at the word ‘corpse,’ but not guilty enough to take it back. As if she could take back the reality of Molly’s stiffening body, of the enormous bloodstain that’s dried and darkened on his shirt. There’s far too much gore to pretend it came from a simple flesh wound.  
  
          “I have a coat,” Caleb says evenly, hands restless within the deep pockets of the ratty brown thing. “Nott and Yasha and Fjord it would not fit. Jester does not feel the cold. It has to be you, Beauregard.”

          “It’s his. Shouldn’t he be – I don’t know, buried or burned with it, or whatever it is we plan to do?"

          From Crapper’s other side, Keg speaks up.

          “I didn’t know your friend that long, Beau, but I don't think he’d want you to freeze to death.”

          A bitter laugh Beau didn’t know she had in her works its way up her throat like bile. “You really didn’t know him that long,” she snorts. “He’d have loved it. Bastard laughed at my limp the second time we fucking met.”

          “Wait, you have a limp?”

          “No. But I said I did, and he didn’t know any better.”

          “Well, Molly was always good at seeing through bullshit,” Caleb says.

          “I hated that about him,” Beau grumbles. Abandoning the comfortable vitriol she’d developed with Molly during their acquaintance in favor of not speaking ill of the dead would be too final for her tastes. That he doesn’t respond to her barb by finding some creative new way to tell her to go fuck herself is an ache in her gut she chooses to ignore.

          Keg laughs, a short, harsh bark that dies quickly when Caleb turns his dead-eyed stare on her. 

          Beau shivers at another gust of wind that blows falling snow past her arms. She halts Crapper, holding up a hand to indicate that Nott and Caleb should call Toilet and John to a halt as well. Refusing to look at Caleb, to concede he was right about the chill, she pulls Molly’s sleeves gingerly from his arms, doing her utmost to avoid touching the body. Keg glances over Crapper’s back at her and nods. She hauls Molly’s corpse up by the armpits with a gentleness Beau wouldn’t have suspected her of possessing, and Beau slips the coat out from under him. He looks so plain when Keg sets him back down on the horse; still purple-skinned and tattooed and bejeweled, of course, but less vibrant in just his travelling clothes, both the spirit of life and that obnoxious damn coat gone from him.

           Beau feels like the moment she puts on the coat should be significant, somehow, but it isn't. She can feel the others’ eyes on her as she turns her head away from the road, the horses, Molly’s body – she can’t look at him while doing this thing that maybe the others are right that he would want but that feels like a betrayal, especially when she owes him so much already for saving her life at the cost of his own – and slips the coat on over her shoulders. It’s big on her, but warmer than she would have expected for its weight and the fine material it’s made of. It smells like sweat and blood – stomach-turning, but so  _ alive _ she has to bury her face in the collar for a moment to hide her tears from the others.

_           I’ll kill him _ , she promises the patterned fabric.  _ I’ll kill him if it’s the last fucking thing I do. I’ll take the fucker down with me if that’s what I have to do to make him pay.  _ It’s the least she can do to repay the life debt that hangs over her head now. Dead or not, she won’t give Molly the satisfaction of having something so big as her life, whatever worth it might or might not have, over on her; he was smug enough before she owed him each breath of winter air to enter and leave her lungs.

          Beau straightens up, pulling the coat tight around her and fighting back a deluge of tears. “Right,” she says, her voice rough. “Whatever the hell we’re doing now, we’re doing a few things as soon as we can: we’re getting Jester and Fjord and Yasha back, and we are killing each and every one of those mother _ fuckers _ .”

          “Damn right,” Keg says.

          “That asshole didn’t die in vain, capiche?”

          “Er, capiche,” Caleb says.

          “Capiche.” Nott takes a swig from her flask.

          “Capiche.” Keg’s hand tightens into a fist around the haft of the battleaxe sheathed in her belt. Beau recognizes the determined anger in her eyes

          Beau turns her eyes back to the road. “Let’s keep moving, then. We’ve got a hell of a way to go.”

**Author's Note:**

> As always, comments are much appreciated!


End file.
